Yuchun Fang, Zhengyan Ma, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Xiang Bai

Multi-task learning and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have been successfully used in various fields. This paper considers the integration of CNN and multi-task learning in a novel way to further improve the performance of multiple related tasks. Existing multi-task CNN models usually empirically combine different tasks into a group which is then trained jointly with a strong assumption of model commonality. Furthermore, traditional approaches usually only consider small number of tasks with rigid structure, which is not suitable for large-scale applications. In light of this, we propose a dynamic multi-task CNN model to handle these problems. The proposed model directly learns the task relations from data instead of subjective task grouping. Due to its flexible structure, it supports task-wise incremental training, which is useful for efficient training of massive tasks. Specifically, we add a new task transfer connection (TTC) between the layers of each task. The learned TTC is able to reflect the correlation among different tasks guiding the model dynamically adjusting the multiplexing of the information among different tasks. With the help of TTC, multiple related tasks can further boost the whole performance for each other. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed dynamic multi-task CNN model outperforms traditional approaches.